She waited calmly; and, with her wonted quickness of step, she mounted the short steep ladder leading from the cart to the platform of the scaffold. Then, her shining eyes turned to the colossal statue of Liberty lately erected near it, she said, bowing to the goddess of her worship, "O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!"
Swiftly the axe clanked down; swiftly the heroic heart ceased to beat. It had not once quickened with fear. A witness, who daily haunted the place of execution, has borne strange testimony to Madame Roland's Spartan courage. When her head was severed from her body, he saw two enormous jets of blood thrown up from her mutilated trunk—an exceptional fact, for habitually only a few scant drops oozed slowly from the veins, whose blood had all been driven to the heart by apprehension.
The wife of Roland had said that he would not survive her. She was not mistaken. The news of her execution determined him to follow her. But how? He intended at first to force his way to the Convention, and to make his voice heard of its Representatives before he, too, took the way to the scaffold, which his great wife had trodden before him. But the difficulty of carrying out this scheme made him prefer the simpler course of taking his own life, by which he also mistakenly hoped to secure his fortune to his daughter. The good ladies who had so bravely sheltered him all this time, finding they could not shake his purpose, evinced a truly noble friendship by doing all in their power to assist him in his undertaking. In the evening of the 15th of November he bade them a last farewell; then, in the gloaming, with face set Paris-ward, he rapidly walked along, with the
